the adventures of a brand-new New Yorker in the entertainment industry

Tag: life lessons

Has this ever happened to you? My roommate and I occasionally save up the money to call in a woman to tidy up our apartment — kind of as gift to ourselves when the rush of New York living becomes a bit too overwhelming to get the energy up to clean the living room. Last month, I got a text from her asking if we needed her services any time soon… and I found myself suddenly submerged in an uncomfortable awareness.

The money that my roommate and I save up and set aside for a cleaning — that I usually see as simply “paying for a service” — that money was essential to this woman’s livelihood. In paying her to clean my apartment, I was giving her the means through which she could pay the rent in her own.

It was a sharp moment of emotional clarity about the grander nature of our transaction that sent pinpricks up my arms. I got to thinking. What else might my transactions be directly responsible for? Why had the simple-yet-obvious knowledge of where my money was going been so invisible to me before? And why, now that I’d realized the emotional truth of the transactional nature of money, did I feel so disconcerted by it?

As I tried to answer these questions for myself, I found myself tumbling down a rabbit hole of existential unease (as I’m, apparently, wont to do). The story, it goeth thusly:

Get to work constructing a Parallel Universe Machine so you can hop dimensions?

Take to Facebook and proclaim your undying hatred for bigots and racists and misogynists (oh my!)?

So many choices, you don’t know what to do with yourself, right? Well, I took the liberty of exploring them all for you to save you some time, and have come up with a few tidbits of knowledge to share for the trouble. My first discovery? Two of the three above options are dead ends.

I’m still working on the Probability Drive for the Parallel-Dimension Hopping Machine. I’ll get back to you on that one.

My second discovery is going to take a whole blog post to explain, so bear with me. The story, it goeth thusly:Continue reading →

A few weeks ago, I had an illuminating experience. And that’s the best sort-of-pun I could come up with after thinking really hard about it for forty minutes. The story, it goeth thusly:

One of the perks of moving to New York is that I’m now living much closer to my family. My brother lives in the city, my parents live within driving distance, and my sister is in the process of moving Somewhere in The General Vicinity of The Eastern Seaboard, Probably.

And that’s not to mention all the members of my extended family, who decided en masse to go west once they realized I was headed back home.

So your first question is: “what’s up with the weird blog title, Becca?”

Well, that’s great question, Anonymus Reader Created For My Convenience. Let me tell you a quirky roundabout story that will take up an entire blog post in order to provide you with an answer. The story, it goeth thusly:

There once was a poem I read my freshman year of high school. I’d give you the title and the author, but those details have been lost to me in the wilderness of memory. The only thing I do remember is that in the poem, the poet was gifted a pair of socks–and these socks were so soft and so treasured by the poet that he kept them forever in a golden birdcage instead of wearing them.

I was so in love with that image that for the longest time my greatest ambition was to find a golden birdcage in which to keep all my socks.

Yeah. Sure. Your pad is pretty swag. But you know what would make it classier? SOCKS. SOCKS WOULD SWAG THAT PLACE RIGHT UP.